Creating specular and roughness maps

- We're seeing that many of the applications…we use for content creation,…both on the 3D side and the game engine,…are supporting a physically-based rendering workflow,…where our shaders react truly physically correctly,…or at least very close, to light.…And so with that, we've seen the rise of new maps.…What I'm going to do is take my slate roofing,…create a spec map for it, or specular map,…where it shows where those highlights are,…and a roughness map.…I'm going to tuck these, as they're greyscale,…into the alpha channels of the diffuse…and normal maps respectively.…

So I'm getting four maps from two images.…What I've done is to copy and paste my slate over…from my working slate base into my working roofing.…And you can see in here, although I've equalized…the colors and they're fairly even green-grey through,…that there are a few places, like right here…in the middle, where there's a spot that hits a hard edge.…And we can tell it's the edge of a slate.…What I'm going to do is take part of my normal base…and make an ambient occlusion map quickly,…

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11/6/2014

Slate is a popular design choice for modern flooring and roofs, but getting an accurate slate texture out of the box for your models can be hard. With this installment of Creating Textures, you can build a custom slate texture in Photoshop and put it to work in the 3D modeling program of your choice. Adam Crespi begins the course by creating the base structure, and then layering in the color variation that occurs naturally in slate. He then cuts out roof and floor tiles to take into 3ds Max. There he links the texture to materials and adds the organic rough edges that gives slate its distinctive look.

Combine this technique with the wood and metal cladding courses for all your interior and exterior modeling needs!